My obsession with Bill ...

In The Pedant in the Kitchen, Julian Barnes gives the home cook some fine advice. "Never, ever," he writes, "point at a photograph in a cookbook and say: 'I'm going to make that.' You can't. I once knew a commercial photographer who specialised in food and, believe me, the post-production work that recently gave us a slimline Kate Winslet is as nothing compared to what they shamelessly do to food."

This is right, of course, I know it is, but my God, sometimes it's hard to resist. Last week I made some cheesecakes for precisely the reason that they looked good in a book. I don't even like cheesecake. Nor does the WFE*. But I saw them, I lusted after them, and when I could resist the passionate yearning no longer, I made them.

They came out of the oven looking totally rubbish. In the book, they were neat, fluffy little things, their edges prettily scalloped where their muffin cases had been softly peeled away. Mine, on the other hand, were grotesquely swollen in the manner of nuclear clouds and stuck, tight, to their paper cases so that when I attempted to remove them they fell apart: then they looked as if a large rodent had attacked them. In this instance, though, my disappointment went far beyond knowing that I had fallen, again, into the old trap. These cheesecakes were from a new book by Bill Granger, the Australian cook with whom I have a borderline obsession, and since I'd never before known one of Bill's recipes to go wrong - not even the ones accompanied by dewy photographs - I felt quite devastated. Not to be over the top or anything, but as I sat on the floor by the oven, gin in hand, I thought: "Et tu, Bill?"

Bill Granger is very famous in Australia, where he owns several restaurants. Here his following is mostly limited to those who have stumbled on his books - 800,000 copies sold so far - in Waterstone's. This is what happened to me. I was browsing, looking for the guy who would, in one stroke, fix all my culinary problems, when our eyes met. There he was, gazing out at me from his book Every Day. How approachable he looked, and how handsome, padding across his kitchen in his bare feet. So I bought it, and that evening I made Bill's spaghetti marinara for the WFE, who loved it. Result. The next night I made his laksa; the next, his biryani. No complaints were forthcoming. No wonder I began to trust in Bill. No wonder that I did not laugh out loud when he whispered to me that I should make my own muesli bars, the better to eat breakfast on the run. Instead I headed dutifully to the beardy-weirdy shop to buy a large bag of wheat germ.

Bill is not as other chefs, or even other men. He likes to wear white, but Armani-ish deconstructed white linen, not chef's whites. When he wears an apron, it is usually made of denim. One of his daughters is called Bunny. His favourite piece of kitchen equipment is his bundt tin ("I adore my bundt tin!"). Most idiosyncratic of all, he likes fried eggs with radicchio and torn bread for breakfast. If I gave T a plate of eggs with radicchio and torn bread for breakfast, he would think that my joke about our compost bin ("This'll fry up lovely in the morning!" I say, waving a plastic tub of tea bags, carrot tops, eggshells and bacon rind at him) had terrifyingly passed into reality, and call the local insane asylum immediately. Anyway, in another cook, all this might be somewhat off-putting. But Bill's dad was a butcher, so I try to take comfort in the fact that he has a healthy respect for a chop.

The cheesecake debacle is troubling, though. In the kitchen, you can lose faith so easily. I have found Bill's crinkly smile working on me rather less effectively in the days since. I am growing critical. Last night, I made the poached pears with vanilla ice cream and coffee sauce from Feed Me Now! It worked, but if I am going to be truthful, the sauce overwhelms the pears, and you are left with about eight gallons of it - which would be fine if I owned an ice cream van, but is problematic in my bijou London kitchen. It's like boyfriends, isn't it, this cookbook lark? One is fickle, and ruthless. It's as if I've woken up in bed with Bill and noticed how hairy his back is. Right now I think that he and his bundt tin will survive the summer. He looks good in a T-shirt, after all. But come the autumn, I may have to end it. To the list of advice for cookbook addicts, then, let me add that having major hots for an author is no basis at all for believing that he'll turn out to be any different to all the others.

*World's fussiest eater

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